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1. It's the details that make the difference. Excess carbs are more fattening becuase carbs are converted directly to sugar and stored. However it's true that excess calories will ultimately cause weight gain no matter how long it takes or what the process.

Excess carbs aren't more fattening than excess fat. You're just less likely to accidentally eat excess fat because you will feel satisfied earlier and stop.

3. A balanced diest with fats - this is new. Now they're going to let us eat fats. Is this a 33/33/33% diet being proposed. Idon't think so, but that would be a big improvement over no or very low fats.

I think that 'Omega 3' has been promoted as being healthy for a long time. I still think that CW is very opposed to saturated fats, but I *think* that there's a slow momentum change there. It's really hard to tell though, since I have rose tinted 'confirmation bias' sunglasses on.

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Excess carbs aren't more fattening than excess fat. You're just less likely to accidentally eat excess fat because you will feel satisfied earlier and stop.

i think this is a huge point that is being missed in this debate. a lot of people here are saying "when i eat carbs i gain weight" etc... a couple things are actuallyhappening here. 1-by eating more carbs they are probably retaining more water, not looking as lean overall, and seeing the scale creep up a few lbs. so they equate carbs as bad. 2-they are eating the same things they have been eating, but adding in more carbs. thus creating a caloric surplus. if you are increasing your carbs, then lower your fat to keep caloric intake the same. and finally 3-fat causes satiation more easily . its hard to sit down and eat spoonfulls of bacon fat. its easy to eat a few pounds of potatoes roasted in bacon fat and sprinkled with salt. 6 scrambled eggs (full) or an entire family sized box of cheezits (overate and hungry 20 minutes later)

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I know it isn't just about the carbs, but there are many people here who would benefit greatly from going low(er) carb.

I think instead of focusing on carbohydrates specifically, you could talk about being wheat or grain free, and that way they'll be lower carb by default. If you remove dense, dry flours from your diet, it's hard to eat a lot of carbohydrates by anyone's standards. Unless you suck down sugar like Derpamix, which most people don't.

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Thank you for your recent Fact or Fiction note - it closely mirrors the same advice that the government has been giving for over 30 years. Since we have become a nation of obese TypeII diabetics by listening to that, please forgive me if I ignore your advice.

Sincerely,

P.S. You might want to look up the definitions of "fact" and "opinion," so that you might learn the difference.

(Okay, the PS is a bit snotty.)

"Right is right, even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it." - St. Augustine

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Thank you for your recent Fact or Fiction note - it closely mirrors the same advice that the government has been giving for over 30 years. Since we have become a nation of obese TypeII diabetics by listening to that, please forgive me if I ignore your advice.

Sincerely,

P.S. You might want to look up the definitions of "fact" and "opinion," so that you might learn the difference.

(Okay, the PS is a bit snotty.)

People are fat because they are lazy and eat too much of the wrong food, not from following health authories advice. The government still advocates whole foods and exercise, not mcdonalds and sitting on the couch.

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Excess carbs aren't more fattening than excess fat. You're just less likely to accidentally eat excess fat because you will feel satisfied earlier and stop.

'Sugar storage space'. What is that? I prefer the term 'metabolic syndrome'.

I think that 'Omega 3' has been promoted as being healthy for a long time. I still think that CW is very opposed to saturated fats, but I *think* that there's a slow momentum change there. It's really hard to tell though, since I have rose tinted 'confirmation bias' sunglasses on.

Hi MagicMerl, I agree. My explanation is both wrong and stupid. Both here and on another thread yesterday I attempted a short, simple explanation of one of the primary processes and am embarassed by the results. Short and simple are not that easy.

As you know, it's not really the excess carbs that fail to signal 'stop eating', it's the added chemicals like HFCS that do it. I suppose I'll keep trying for a satisfactory 'simple' explanation for a while. Maybe it can't be done.

"When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power." - Alston Chase

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As you know, it's not really the excess carbs that fail to signal 'stop eating', it's the added chemicals like HFCS that do it. I suppose I'll keep trying for a satisfactory 'simple' explanation for a while. Maybe it can't be done.

Add salt, spices, HFCS, sugar, or other "chemicals" and overeating becomes more easy! Few people will overeat on rice alone, but add sugar, cinneamon, honey and low fat milk and some people may overeat on that as well...

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

- Schopenhauer

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If you are willing to come along, let's conduct a little thought experiment.

Let's take a fasting subject and clamp his ( no gender insensitivity intended ) insulin levels at 500 pmol/l. This level is about 5x the average baseline concentration and is typical of what we might observe following a carbohydrate containing meal as metabolism attempts to maintain normoglycemia. Of course, in our experiment, our subject is receiving an exogenous infusion of insulin aimed at keeping his plasma concentration at this level, and further, there is no food being ingested.

If we were to do this, we can be certain of one thing: we would absolutely crush plasma levels of non-esterified fatty acids ( NEFA ). Now, NEFA only enter the plasma from adipose tissue bound to albumin, whereas dietary fats circulate as triacylglycerides in chylomicrons. Since we're not eating, we can ignore the dietary triglycerides, so what we are doing is locking energy inside of adipose tissue.

Motorcycle fuel gauges are notoriously unreliable, so most motorcycles aren't equipped with them. Instead what is done is that a motorcycle's fuel tank is divided into two sections, a large, primary fuel tank, and a much smaller reserve. Motorcycles also come equipped with a three position valve, allowing you to select the fuel delivery source as either being off, reserve, or the main tank. When your engine starts to sputter for lack of fuel, you switch to reserve and start looking for a gas station. Once refueled, you switch back to primary, at least, that's the theory. There are more times than I care to mention that I've found myself on the side of the road trying to troubleshoot an engine that refuses to start, only to realize that I had been running on reserve fuel instead of the primary, and a simple twist of the valve sets everything right again.

Our hapless victim ( a.k.a. test subject ) finds himself in a similar situation when we flip his metabolic fuel switch from his erstwhile principal fuel store ( adipose NEFA ) to reserve (glycogen). Under these admittedly contrived circumstances, rather than oxidizing fat for energy, he will become an obligate glycolytic machine. This in turn will stimulate glycogenolysis, gluconeogenesis, and with that, accelerated proteolysis.

Now, since this is only a thought experiment, we can do something that would be impossible in a real experiment: we can rewind time to just before our intervention and replace our insulin infusion with an inert saline drip. The truly interesting question at this point is what would we observe in comparing the body composition of the two experimental interventions?

Persist in this course for several days, say a week, and we would would find that the hyperinsulinemic subject would have a lower body mass, but higher absolute and relative body fat levels compared to his normoinsulinemic self. He would have a lower body mass because he had been forced to oxidize something other than fat, which basically means glucose, as well as protein to convert to glucose, and the energy yield from NEFA is roughly four times that of other substrates ( we are accounting for dry weight here ). This means that you need to oxidize a whole lot more of the non NEFA substrates, if energy requirements are held constant. Obviously, since the hyperinsulinemic subject is not oxidizing adipose tissue contents, he is left fatter but lighter when all is said and done.

Since our subject has not been eating, this divergent outcome cannot be blamed on any macronutrient he has ingested. It can, however, be explained entirely by the endocrinological context that we created, and most specifically by our chronic elevation of insulin.

To the extent that your diet starts to approximate our thought experiment, you should expect to come closer and closer to the posited outcomes. How would you do this? Frequent meals consisting of relatively high levels of carbohydrate. Note, that it is not the absolute CHO level that is relevant here, but rather the persistent insulin elevation. This implies that eating at the same absolute CHO intake, but taking all your carbs at one sitting is a better strategy, because you only elevate insulin in a transient rather than persistent fashion.

Most people do not make this distinction and instead you get the somewhat simplistic "carbohydrates drive insulin drives body fat" argument.

It's not the outright lies that get you, it's the partial truth that does the most damage.